Season of the Harvest Page 6

  Jack moved quickly from the cover of the vestibule to the hallway. He quickly checked the lavatory, again noting how everything that could be opened had been carefully searched and discarded. Then he moved farther down the hall to the two bedrooms. The master bedroom, where Sheldon slept, looked just like the living room: a shambles. The master bathroom was the same.

  Stepping quietly to the end of the hall, Jack poked the muzzle of his gun into the darkened second bedroom, where Sheldon had all of his computer and audio equipment. He flipped on the light.

  Like the other rooms, everything had been meticulously searched. The computer cases, all seven of them, had been torn or hacked open and the hard drives ripped out. The two laptops Sheldon used for his audio work, one for composing, the other for mixing, were cracked open like crabs, the drives pried from the cases.

  The thing that most disturbed him was the strange ammonia-burning hemp smell: it was the strongest in here, far stronger than it had been in the kitchen.

  “What the hell were they looking for?” he wondered aloud. Satisfied that the apartment was clear, he still held onto the Glock. Just in case.

  He took one last look around the computer room before moving back down the hallway toward the kitchen, turning the lights off behind. He wasn’t concerned about leaving fingerprints, because his prints and fibers were already all over the condo from the many times he’d been here. He just hoped that he hadn’t destroyed any possible evidence of the intruder or intruders in the course of his search.

  Jack found himself standing in the kitchen, careful to stay well away from the mound of dumped-out food beside the central island. He didn’t want to leave any smoking-gun evidence that he had been here before the cops or other Bureau agents.

  Looking at the top of the island, he saw that its surface was smeared with a mishmash of food. Jack realized that the intruders must have dumped out every container onto the island’s big cutting board, sifted through the contents, and then swept it all off onto the floor before setting the container carefully against the wall. It was bizarre. And the containers hadn’t been opened as the manufacturers had intended: cans, boxes, and plastic bottles looked like they’d been gnawed open, while glass jars and beer bottles were all broken off at the top, as if whoever had opened them had either bitten down on the glass, or perhaps had been so strong that the container simply shattered. Glancing at the mound of food, he could see glittering glass fragments and crushed lids poking out of the runny debris.

  Kneeling down, he looked carefully at the pile of food surrounding the island like a moat. No footprints, he thought, shocked. The intruders must have been standing right next to the island while they tore Sheldon’s kitchen to bits, dumping all the food on the floor, but there wasn’t a single footprint in the entire ankle-deep mess to show where they’d been standing. There also weren’t any prints or smears of food on the floor leading away into other parts of the house or to the front door, which was the only exit. It was as if the intruders had been levitating while they’d made this mess.

  “That’s not possible,” he whispered.

  The counters that formed a U shape around the island held all of the dishes, bowls, glasses, and other kitchen paraphernalia that had been in the cabinets. In stark contrast to the mess around the island, the items on the counter had all been stacked neatly, no doubt after having been removed and inspected for whatever the intruders hoped to find here. A rack for Sheldon’s copper-bottomed pans and pots hung over the island, but Jack knew it couldn’t support a man’s weight. He had helped Sheldon put it up, and while it was sturdy, it wasn’t that sturdy. There was no way someone could cling to it to stay clear of the mess before somehow springing into the living room to reach the front door to leave. There were no prints evident on the island, although that could only be verified with a thorough examination by a forensic team.

  The only thing Jack saw that he was sure was new was a set of deep grooves near one edge of the cutting board, as if someone had driven some sort of wave-shaped blade into the wood. It gave him the creeps, but he didn’t know why.

  The fresh condition of the perishable food dumped on the kitchen floor told him that the condo had been ransacked recently. He knelt down and with the back of his hand touched the mangled remains of a frozen roast that had been hacked apart. It was no longer frozen, but was still quite cold.

  They were here only a few hours ago, he thought, a chill running up his spine as he snatched his hand away and stood up. Had he gotten it in his mind to drive over here earlier, perhaps after leaving the Hoover Building that evening, things might have been interesting to the point of being deadly.

  He moved back into the living room, his mind again returning to the question of why. It was about information, he felt certain, something that Sheldon had found before he died. The computers were the obvious thing to start with, and the intruders had simply torn out the hard drives, just like the ones at the LRU lab in Nebraska.

  But the search of the furniture, the food, even the toilet cleaning supplies told him that they were also looking for something else, something that wasn’t in the computers. They’d spent a considerable amount of time here and taken a lot of risk to dig through everything, so they had some expectation that it, whatever “it” was, would be here.

  It must have been small, he thought, or they wouldn’t have bothered searching through the smaller jars and containers. He couldn’t think of what it might be, unless it was some sort of small data storage device, like the thumb drive that Sheldon used for his hacker tools. Presumably his killers found that, because he never went anywhere without it, and Richards had said it hadn’t been found in the search at LRU.

  Frowning, Jack recalled that Sheldon had never mentioned a secret or special place, a wall safe, perhaps, where he might hide something here. He didn’t even have a safe deposit box, and Jack felt confident that if he did have one he would have told Jack, and probably given him a key. That was the level of trust the two men had shared.

  But why didn’t he tell you what he’d gotten into? Jack asked himself.

  Frustrated, Jack knew he had to get down to Quantico, but found himself in a conundrum. He had to report this and get a crime scene crew in here, but he didn’t want to be delayed in getting down to the lab or drop himself into hot water by being here in the first place. He knew he must have been recorded by the security cameras in the lobby, even if the woman at the front desk hadn’t gotten a good look at him, so he couldn’t just pretend not to have been here. If he called headquarters, there was a better than even chance that Clement would find out in about five minutes and pin him to the wall for getting involved after he’d been told to butt out. He also couldn’t just call the local cops to delay the information getting to the Bureau. Clement would kick his ass even harder for that. Calling the Washington Field Office would normally have been the best choice: located on 4th Street Northwest, it had jurisdiction for the greater D.C. area, its territory extending south and west into Virginia. Unfortunately, even that would probably land him in front of Clement’s desk. It would just take about ten minutes longer.

  He only had one remaining alternative.

  “Shit,” he muttered as he pulled out his phone and dialed.

  After two rings he heard, “Special Agent Richards. This is getting pretty tiresome, Dawson.”

  He’s got me in his address book now, Jack thought with a grim smile. “I’ve got something for you, but I need you to keep Clement off my back until I’m done at the lab.”

  “You’re not there yet?” Richards snapped.

  “No...” Jack hesitated. “I stopped at Sheldon’s condo on the way.”

  “You dumb fuck!” Richards exploded. “You know better than that!”

  “Listen,” Jack said quickly, cutting him off from what he knew would be a well-deserved tongue-lashing, but now wasn’t the time, “the place has been methodically torn to pieces. I’ve never seen anything like this. They pulled Crane’s hard drives just like
they did at the LRU labs, but I don’t think they found what they were really looking for. And I’m pretty sure the condo was ransacked in the last few hours.”

  “Goddammit, Dawson,” Richards growled, and Jack could imagine his bald head flushed red with barely suppressed anger, “you just contaminated the crime scene, you idiot.”

  “Bullshit,” Jack told him. “This place is already loaded with physical evidence from me: I’ve been here quite a few times, remember?” He shook his head as he looked around at the gutted living room, recalling the vision of the mess in the kitchen without any hand- or footprints anywhere. “No, aside from the mess itself, I don’t think the forensics guys are going to find much of anything here. This is really weird, Richards. This job was tackled by a ghost.”

  “Same here,” Richards told him, his voice taking on a tone more of resigned frustration than anger. “I hope your lab girlfriend has more luck, because our forensics team here hasn’t come up with anything at all other than bits and pieces of Crane. If we had to make a case based on nothing but the physical evidence we’ve got here, we’d have to say that he gutted himself.”

  Jack cringed at the words, and was shocked to hear Richards apologize.

  “Sorry, Dawson. That was a shitty thing to say, even for me.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jack told him. “But listen, I need you to cover for me. We’ve got to get a team over here right away, but I want to get down to the lab before Clement wrings my neck.”

  Richards sighed. “Jesus, Dawson, you’re pulling an awfully big tiger by the tail,” he said. “All right. Give me the address there so I don’t have to look it up.” Jack told him. “I’ll come up with some bullshit story to cover your ass for now, but you’re going to have to pay the piper on this one eventually. So will I, I’m sure. You owe me, big time.”

  “How about a lifetime supply of Rogaine?” Jack asked as he backed out of the condo and carefully closed the door, making sure it latched and locked before he headed down the hall.

  “Real funny, Dawson,” Richards grunted. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” Then the line went dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Back in his Defender, Jack made his way from Sheldon’s condo to I-95 and headed south toward Quantico. The trip passed in the rhythmic blur and scrape of the windshield wipers as he tried to focus on what had happened since he’d found out about Sheldon’s death. He was letting his mind spin again, just as he had at home, trying to figure out what the intruders at the condo had been looking for, but his brain refused to cooperate.

  He got off on Exit 148 toward Marine Corps Base Quantico, then turned right onto Russell Road. From there, it was one and a half miles to the base entrance. After showing his badge to the Marines on duty, Jack drove two miles through the pitch-black woods of the base to the entrance of the FBI compound where the Academy and the lab were located. He checked through another guard post before he turned left on J. Edgar Hoover Road, then circled around the lab complex and entered the parking garage. He pulled into one of the open spaces on the ground floor and turned off the Defender’s engine.

  Sitting there for just a moment, listening to the tink...tink...tink sound as the engine cooled, he suffered another twinge of guilt at not having called Jerri, and knew that she would probably not be at all happy that he’d turned up here. But she would forgive him for it.

  A bit late to worry about it now, he chided himself as he got out of the car and jogged through the rain along the curving concrete path to the front entrance. In the daytime, it was an impressive multi-storied structure of stone and glass, with nine large vent pipes in clusters of three rising from the roof. While Jack had never been partial to modern architectural design, the lab’s architects had made a functional design that was also fairly attractive.

  Right now, in the dark and pouring rain, lit by periodic flashes of lightning in the distance, he had the sudden impression of Frankenstein’s castle on the fateful night when the madman’s monster was brought to life.

  Making his way through the main entrance, showing his badge to the building’s security officers, he headed straight for Jerri’s lab. He had barely pushed the door open when she was in his arms.

  “Jesus, Jack,” she said after kissing him on the cheek, then drawing him back into a tight embrace. The top of her head came to just above his shoulder. Her hair was jet black and long, flowing down her back nearly to her waist. She had almond-shaped eyes that were as beautiful as they were expressive, and the complexion typical of someone of Japanese ancestry. “Why didn’t you call me?” she asked softly.

  “Because I wanted to be here when they brought in the evidence, and...” The words caught in his throat and he felt his eyes begin to tear up again.

  “And you thought I wouldn’t let you come down,” Jerri finished for him, standing back enough to meet his gaze. “You should know me better than that.”

  Jack, at a loss for words, only nodded as he fought to keep himself together.

  “Listen,” she told him, cupping his face in her hands, “don’t do the macho idiot thing on me, okay?”

  “Okay,” he breathed. “I promise. No more macho crap.”

  She smiled, then stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Good,” she told him. “Now, let’s–”

  “Jerri!” someone said urgently, poking his head in the door from the hallway, “It’s here!”

  “Okay,” she told him, giving Jack a reassuring squeeze before she turned to the man in the hallway. “We’re ready. Let’s get rolling.”

  A small army of technicians went through everything that was in the boxes sent from the Lincoln team, sorting out what needed to go where. The FBI Laboratory was made up of nearly twenty units that focused on various aspects of crime scene and related analysis, including Jerri’s unit, DNA Analysis Unit-1, which specialized in nuclear DNA analysis. Many of the samples retrieved by the on-scene forensics team had traces of blood on them, and Jerri’s unit had to analyze the blood before the other units could do their work.

  She quickly organized her staff to take samples from the clothing and other items that had been sent, and set up the necessary tests for samples that had been swabbed from the walls and other areas around the murder scene and the LRU lab by the forensics team in Lincoln.

  The last cardboard evidence box to be opened, and the one she decided to handle herself, was the one containing Sheldon’s weapon and two extra magazines. Weapons were normally unloaded before they were transported for analysis, but in the case of weapons that had blood or other evidential residue that might be at risk if the weapon were handled to unload it, the weapon was bagged, tagged, and boxed, with a warning on the box indicating it was loaded. Sheldon’s weapon and the magazines had certainly fit the criteria: they were all spattered with blood.

  Wearing latex gloves and a face mask, Jerri first removed the two magazines from the box. She took several swabs of the blood on each one, with Jack carefully bagging and cataloging everything.

  “Okay,” she said after she’d swabbed the exterior of the first magazine, “go ahead and unload it, and I’ll take a couple of samples from the bullets, just for grins. We won’t test those right away, but I don’t want to leave anything to chance on this. Swabs are cheap.”

  After Jack unloaded the bullets from the first magazine, Jerri took three swabs of bullets that looked like they had some traces of blood on the casings from where blood had seeped inside the magazine. Then she swabbed the inside of the magazine.

  They repeated the process for the second magazine, with Jerri taking swabs from three spots on the metal, then handing them to Jack to file.

  He had just sealed the second magazine into an evidence bag and was marking it when he heard a low voice behind him.

  “He shouldn’t be here.”

  Turning around, Jack found a man wearing lab gear, staring at him as if he were a particularly offensive insect.

  “He’s here on my authority,” Jerri
grated, standing up from her lab stool. “Jack,” she said with cool formality, “meet Dr. Martin Kilburn. He was sent over from CODIS to give us a hand.” The CODIS Unit was where the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, was managed. The results from the DNA tests from Jerri’s team would be entered into the massive CODIS database for storage and cross-indexing. “He seems to forget who’s in charge here.” She stared up at Kilburn, her normally warm eyes ice cold.

  Kilburn ignored her, and continued to stare at Jack.

  “Hey, doc,” Jack said, nodding. Shaking hands was out of the question with everyone wearing latex gloves and handling evidence, but Jack wouldn’t have been inclined to shake Kilburn’s hand anyway. His rude behavior and disrespect toward Jerri had already seriously pissed him off. “Don’t you have some work of your own to do?”

  “He shouldn’t be here,” Kilburn repeated, finally glancing at Jerri. “He’s emotionally involved and he’s not assigned to this unit.”

  “Neither are you,” Jerri snapped. “Now get back to what you were sent down here to do or get the hell out.”

  Kilburn stared at Jack for a moment more, then turned and stalked out of the lab.

  “Jesus,” Jack whispered, “what a creep.”

  “He’s only been here a few months,” Jerri told him, shaking her head in disgust. “Don’t feel bad about the way he treated you. He’s like that with everybody. Not surprisingly, nobody likes him, but the CODIS people say he’s a whiz over there with the DNA database. I’ll take their word for it.”

  “Where the hell did they dig him up?”

  “I think he was working as a researcher for an agri-business before coming here,” Jerri said. “New Horizons, I think.”

  Jack felt like someone had rammed a frozen steel rod down his spine. “New Horizons, huh?” he said quietly. Now there’s a coincidence, he thought. “The university lab where Sheldon was killed was set up by New Horizons,” he told her. “And we think he may have been investigating computer intrusions against their other labs.”